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April 2010

April 25, 2010

BEFORE WE TURN THE PAGE ON THE financial crisis that brought
down the world economy two years ago, I hope that someone high up in Washington
or Wall Street reflects in a very public way – say, on 60 Minutes or the Op-Ed page of The
Wall Street Journal – on the lessons of the biblical book of Leviticus for
our present predicament, in particular Lev 19:11, 13, and 35-36. While Washington is rushing to
tighten regulations to prevent future meltdowns, there’s a larger, social loophole
that’s not being addressed: How do we create a culture of responsibility in
business?

Within these
Old Testament texts, by tradition handed down from God to Moses, and passed down
from generation to generation for thousands of years, I think, is a good starting point
for answering that question:

“You shall not steal; you shall not deal
falsely; and you shall not lie to one another.” (Lev 19:11)

“You shall not defraud your
neighbor; you shall not steal; and you shall not keep for yourself the wages of
a laborer until morning.” (Lev 19:13)

“You shall not cheat in measuring
length, weight or quantity. You shall have honest balances, honest weights, and
honest ephah, and an honest hin.” (Lev 19:35-36)

Don’t steal. Don’t lie. Don’t
defraud. Don’t hold back income that is due to someone. Don’t cheat your
customer. (“Ephah” and “hin,” if you’re wondering, are ancient measures of dry
and liquid weight.)

It seems like a modest
prescription. We’re not talking about giving everything away to the poor here
(that’s for another day). I've recently started taking seminary classes (a longtime dream), and reading the Old Testament have been having "what if" moments -- like, what if Leviticus' rules for business had been posted up and down the business world and taught in business schools and employee training? Would we have avoided:

Banks giving mortgages to people
who had no hope of ever paying them back (“Saying Yes to Anyone, WaMu Built
Empire on Shaky Loans,” headline, The New
York Times, 12/28/2008)…

….then selling the risky loans to Wall
Street firms, who then packaged them into securities and selling them to
unwitting investors who wound up holding the bag (“Securitized Loans Are 5x
More Likely to be Delinquent,” headline in the Wall Street blog The Big Picture, 10/19/2009)…

No doubt people at these companies feel they were putting
customers first; Goldman Sachs, for one, intends to contest its fraud charges.
But many had questions. “We
were giving loans to people that never should have had loans,” a bank
employee is quoted in one story. “Garbage in, garbage out,” said another employee. A worker at one ratings
agency complained his firm had become so beholden to its big customers, it developed
“Stockholm syndrome” (NYT, 4/23/2010).
“We rate everything,” said another employee. “It could be structured by cows and we
would rate it” (NYT, 10/22/08).

Yes, I know the old saw that “business
ethics is a contradiction in terms.” For decades the orthodoxy in business has
been that companies have only one “social responsibility”: as the economist
Milton Friedman put it in a famous 1970 essay, “to increase its profits.” Or in
the famous words of
Gordon Gekko, the tycoon in the movie Wall
Street, “greed is good.”

But
Friedman left a door open. While maintaining that business should “make as much
money as possible,” he allowed that executives needed to conform to “the basic
rules of the society, both those embodied in law and those embodied in ethical
custom.” Does an ancient biblical commandment to be fair and just count as an
ethical custom? I’d say yes.

At the
advent of capitalism, the Bible was part of the
conversation in business. George Fox, the early leader in my faith tradition, Quakerism,
regularly inveighed upon his followers to “deal justly,” “speak the truth,”
keep “just” weights, and be so straightforward in their business that “a child
may come among you and not be wronged.” Quaker businesses listened, and created innovations like a
set, fair price. It turned out to be not only the "right" thing to do but also popular – and
profitable. Good ethics was good business.

One might
argue that Bible says a lot of
things. But, unlike some ideas that pop up, then recede, the business commandments continue through the course of the Bible. They’re repeated in Deuteronomy. They’re echoed in Proverbs: “A false
balance is an abomination to the Lord, but an accurate weight is his delight”
(Pro 11:1). They’re at the heart of what the Old Testament prophets decried in
the world, alongside prophetic broadsides on ignoring the needs of the poor, children,
and widows, and idolizing false gods (all, also, applicable to today’s
problems).

Reading the
prophet Amos’ grievances – of the powerful selling “the righteous for silver
and the needy for a pair of Nikes” (check that, “sandals”); trampling the poor;
taking bribes; and pushing aside the needy (Amos 2:6,7, 5:12) – it’s fair to
ask: What would Amos say today?